As an entrepreneur, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes — but you can always learn from them.
Mistakes aren’t fun to make — okay, maybe sometimes they are — but when you’re trying to get a business off the ground, every bad decision or unfortunately timed choice can feel devastating. You might question whether you know what you’re doing, or fear the long-term consequences of your actions. But you must resist these lines of thinking; mistakes are simply learning opportunities, and these are the five things you need to learn from every mistake you make:
1. What caused the failure point? First, you’ll need to perform a root cause analysis to determine why the mistake was made in the first place. What’s the main reason for the problem here?
2. What information did you miss? Next, think about any points of information that you missed. Did you fail to do enough research? Did you miss some variable that existed without your knowledge? This can help you identify your weaknesses.
3. What systems failed? Do you have systems and processes in place that failed? For example, did someone responsible for the oversight of a given action fail to take that action? Learn where your existing systems went wrong.